This chapter provides an account of the agreements that lead to the creation of justice on the Epicurean view. In doing so, the three sections of the chapter complete the argument of Chapter 1 by focusing on the textual evidence in Epicurus and later Epicurean authors. The first section elaborates on the claim that the Epicureans defend a middle position in the nomos-phusis debate. The second section describes in more detail the content and function of agreements in Epicureanism. And the third section deals with the topic of who can make agreements on the Epicurean view, including the question of whether there can be agreements with nonhuman animals.

This chapter discusses the nomos-phusis debate of the fifth and fourth century BCE and introduces the book’s main argument: that the Epicureans defend a sophisticated middle position (vis-à-vis Plato and Aristotle, on the one hand, and some sophists, on the other) in this debate when it comes to justice. On the Epicurean view, justice is neither fully natural nor conventional; there is a robust virtue of justice and it is always better to be just than to be unjust, but it is not always better to obey the laws.

Modern discussions of Epicureanism often use the descriptions “legal positivism” and “natural law theory” without providing clear definitions of what is meant by these terms. This chapter remedies this deficiency by characterizing the Epicurean theory of justice and law from the perspective of contemporary philosophy of law. The first section develops a clear conceptual framework by distinguishing between different theses that characterize a view as leaning more toward legal positivism or natural law theory. The second section then tests Epicurean theory against these theses, concluding that even if the Epicurean account has some legal positivist leanings, it is overall closer to a kind of natural law theory.

This chapter explores the Histories’ interest in human nature on the battlefield in terms of valour. It reviews instances in which the historical actors – including Pixodarus, Xerxes, and Themistocles – foreground the strategic importance of "surpassing nature." This is a motif that places the speakers in a network of sophistic and later, Platonic, theories on man’s desire to outstrip his own nature. At stake is a philosophy of "superior nature" that is strongly undercut by the complexity of the action on the battlefield.

This chapter surveys the evidence for the sophistic debate on relativism as evident in the fragments of the sophists, including comic and tragic poets. A widespread interpretation of the Histories claims that Herodotus supports nomos without qualification. By contrast, this chapter argues that this claim fails to capture the complexity of Herodotus’ engagement with those figures who use nomos as a rhetorical ploy to justify what is contrary to popular ethics. Similarly, Presocratic thinkers were working through the challenges presented by those who identified nomos as only a relative set of values as opposed to an objective norm to be followed. The Histories’ exploration of the problem of relating custom and law to justice takes place in the context of the rise and expansion of Persian imperialism. Further, it implicates the despot in a relativizing of justice and constitutes a key explanatory paradigm in the Persian attack against the Greek mainland in the Greco-Persian Wars.

This final chapter shifts to look to Herodotus’ reception in the early fourth century in the Dissoi Logoi. What questions does Herodotus raise for subsequent philosophers? How does allusion to the Histories in a treatise that is explicitly philosophical expand our understanding of his project? What is the consequence of this for Herodotus’ generic positionality? The Dissoi Logoi offers a case study in the reception of the Histories as an example of its prominence in intellectual culture. The second half of the chapter reprises the conclusions of the book and reexamines the value of reading what will become early Greek "historiography" alongside philosophy.